The Ancient Orient

HERE,
between the two old rivers which empty into the burning sea after crossing the
solitudes, there is no longer anything more than formless hillocks, choked
canals, and a few poor villages. The sand has covered up everything. Doubtless
it is not much deeper above the Chaldean palaces which have disappeared than
around the temples of the Nile which are still visible at its surface; and the
Greeks must have exaggerated when they assigned two hundred thousand years of
antiquity to Babylonian civilization. But the material of the walls was less
hard and their abandonment by men more complete. And what, then, does it
matter? The true cradle of the human soul is wherever we can recognize the face
of out earliest aspiration.

And yet
how mobile this face is! There it glows with the light of an undying hearth of
contemplative aspirations, here we see concentrated the rigorous will to attain
the visible and practical purpose and not to go beyond it. The statues, which
the dunes covered in the ruins of Tello, bear witness to a mind infinitely more
positive, if not more sure of itself, than ever the Egyptian mind was, even at
the time of the "Seated Scribe," their contemporary by a margin of a
few centuries; and in the old Orient centuries count no more than years. Egypt
had probably built the Pyramids by then, and had given the Sphinx's visage to a
rock; the next age was to plunge her still deeper into mystery and turn her
gaze inward more and more. The statues of Tello are neither gods nor symbols;
they have nothing mysterious about them but their antiquity and that silence
which haunts the old stones found amid the relics of life beneath the ground.
Here is the image of a builder-prince, a rule across his knees. As in Egypt, it
is true, these decapitated bodies are stiff; rigid planes cut them into
rectangular figures, and the limbs remain at rest; but the shoulders have a
terrible squareness, and the hands, instead of reposing on the thighs in the
abandon of thought, are joined and strongly clasped, as if to indicate the
articulation of the bones, the moving relief of the muscles, the folds and the
rough grain of the skin. Two heads found near them have the same energy. One
would think they were natural rocks that had been rolled by the waters, such is
their compactness, their coherence, their sustained roundness.

In
facial feature primitive Mesopotamia was, however, the sister of the plain of
the Nile. The Tigris and the Euphrates, whose alluvial deposits nourish
Mesopotamia, penetrate the country through hundreds of canals which cross one
another around the cultivated fields. Covered with palm trees and date trees,
with fields of wheat and barley, always at its harvest time, always at its seed
time, Mesopotamia was the Eden of the Biblical legends, the granary of western
Asia, to which its caravans and its rivers brought fruits and bread. By way of
the Persian Gulf it launched its fleets on the sea. But renewing its strength
from the tribes which descended from the high plateaus, communicating by its
rivers connected with the oceans of the south, with Armenia and with Syria
which bounds the European Sea, surrounded by more advanced and more accessible
peoples, it remained less shut in than Egypt, and did not, like the latter,
consume itself at its own flame. To the east it made fecund the Medo-Persian
Empires, and through them penetrated into India and even into China. To the
north it extended itself through Assyria until the dawn of the modern
civilizations. To the west it awakened Phoenicia, which opened the route from
Mesopotamia to the valley of the Nile and to the world of the archipelago.

Finally,
the Chaldean theocracy probably adhered more closely to primitive instincts
than the priestly caste did that governed the people of the Nile. It was in
Chaldea that astronomy was born, to which her engineers of hydraulics and her
architects added the unerring instruments of geometry and mechanics. It was
during her brilliant nights, when the earth prolongs its glow, which is due to
the cloudless sky and the flatness of the land, that the shepherds of the
earliest times, as well as those who came later to seek the coolness of the
upper terraces, had observed in the clear sky the turning of the
constellations. The positivistic education of the Egyptians aimed at more
material needs and, because of this, left untouched the source of the great
moral intuitions to which the people turned for a consolation, and which the
Chaldean people, less harshly governed, interpreted in terms of navigation and
trade, while the king-priests of Babylon interpreted it in the higher serenity
which comes with the contemplation of the movements of the heavenly bodies.

Before
the time of those powerful statues, which seem to foretell the end of this
people's evolution and which are certainly the final flower of a culture
centuries old, Chaldean art is almost an entire mystery. Its baked clay, less
hard than the granite of the valley of the Nile or the marble of Pentelicus,
has turned to dust; nothing is left but some sunken foundations. Only stone, which
is scarce in Mesopotamia, can resist under the tide of earth that gnaws and
corrodes like water and ends by reclaiming everything. From Assyro-Chaldean
positivism to Egyptian idealism we find the distance which separates the
consistency of baked clay from that of granite. Between the soil of the country
and the intelligence of men, there have always been such close analogies which
we find are logical and necessary as soon as we understand that the mind
invents nothing—discovers everything. We see, therefore, that a material which
endures ought to give it the idea of permanence, and that a material which
crumbles should give it the idea of fragility and of the practical utilization
of the instruments it can furnish. Thus, also, a sky whose mathematical revolutions
have been scrutinized gives the idea of consecrating the precise means which it
offers for mapping it out.

And so
has disappeared the very skeleton of those monstrous cities which sheltered the
most active peoples of the ancient world, and the most practical, in the modern
sense of the word. Where Babylon rose there is nothing but palm groves on some
vestiges of city walls, around which the sand heaps up. None the less, on the
two banks of the Euphrates, Babylon encircled its multitudes in a belt of walls
twenty-five leagues in length, ninety feet in thickness, bristling with two
hundred and fifty towers and studded with gates of bronze. Built of bricks and
bitumen, with its city walls, palaces, temples, houses, street pavements, the
banks of its canals, its reservoirs, the bridges and quays of the
river—uniform, dull, and reddish in color, here and there touched with enamel,
the city of Semiramis lifted toward the heavens its monotonous buildings,
almost solid blocks with gardens on their terraces, thus resembling the Iranian
foothills, which are bare as far up as the cool plateaus, where forests and
flowers grow. Above these artificial woods were towers, made up of stages built
one upon the other. The plains call for gigantic constructions from which they
can be surveyed from afar and commanded, and which shall be infinite like
themselves.

The
tower of Babel was never to be finished and, as if to explore the ocean of the
stars from nearer by, the temple of Baal rose to a height of two hundred meters.
The tower of Babel is now a formless hill which the desert is absorbing little
by little. Apart from the seals of hard stone which continued to be produced
during the whole civilization of Nineveh, there is perhaps no longer much that
is solid under the sand, and it is possible that Chaldea has nothing more to
reveal to us. The sand still gives up, at times, one of those cuneiform
inscriptions which are the most ancient writing known, and by which the
Chaldeans wrote their legal documents, their acts of purchase and of sale, the
great events of their history, the recital of the deluge—history and legend
intermingled. The few bas-reliefs of Tello must have been an exception in the
industry of the time. The desert is too bare to inspire in man the desire for
multiple forms and luxuriant decoration. It needs, rather, the outer life of
the Assyrians with their wars and hunts, to bring about a more prolonged
contact with living forms. But it brings about nothing which is not strongly
indicated in the bas-relief of Tello, where vultures carry off in their claws
and tear with their beaks strips of human bodies, and in the dense black
statues with prominent muscles.